Editor's Introduction: Modern Kitchen, Good Home, Strong Nation

Abstract

The domestic, as a modern American commonplace, was ambiguous territory for technology. The three articles in this issue began as papers for a conference at the Hagley Museum and Library in November 2000 called "Kitchens: Design, Technologies, and Work." They persist as meditations on how commercially driven design and mass-produced technologies settled into the kitchens of the United States in the twentieth century. Ideologically and spatially, these inquiries come to the kitchen from outside: from the institutional kitchens children encountered when they were seasonally set loose from the bounds of home, from the design divisions of domestic appliance manufacturers, and from home economics teaching faculties. Together they illustrate how the work of procuring and managing kitchen equipment manifested and remade American understandings of class and gender.

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